There are commercial overdrives that use the CD4007, but looks like they typically tie all the stages to a common VDD rail supply..I would think that it would be neat to be able to dial in the headroom each stage.

thank you all for your responses - i have been away for rehab, yes i am an old man, barely enough stamina to leverage the lever of the hydraulic jack to change my car's lubes to save gasoline money (35 increased to 40 using amsoil! both tranny and engine lubes)

back to theme: i did manage to successfully create the smt but it is cumbersome having all those bjourn micro sized multi-turn trimmers. so i thought if there was a programmer who'd know how to resolve this partial differential equation. as it is now i can only vary one parameter at a time to observe signature impact (scope documents waveform response). this approach is caveman, rather empirical. it'd be proficient to run a computer programmer's program that varies all parameters until the equation is resolved - since we know all of the boundary conditions, right? they are output waveform, input waveform and battery tension. circuitry must accomodate by either over-emphasizing or under-emphasizing characteristics of the waveform that in turn interacts with reactive amplification components (OT/spkr, lesser extent tele stock pickups). the tele has exceptionally pure waveform, that of a sinusoid. but when we look closely at some of this world's sought after tone, e.g., dumble, we find the waveform is intentionally skewed because of the reactive component to which it will interface to. this is the black magic in a nutshell. it is so coveted creators expend more effort protecting their derivations than developing it, so called intellictual property.

Sorry to hear that.
I think that the goal of the original designers who used it to distort was rounded clipping (they got it), very low cost (idem) and ***simplicity*** which applies to a 2 resistor per gain stage device.

Once you start complicating it, even a little bit ..... forget it, there's much better (and still simple) available.

Laney made good use of them, even in clean gain stages (Bass amps), etc.

then migrate over threshold your recommend schematic laney four cascade - recall excessive gains in single jump will blunt bandwidth, right? isn't this why signature gets mooshee on low end and muffled on highs? so prudence dictates small jumps over many cascaded stages - is this correct?

My first job in California was with a company that made radio test gear. Some of the guys took a Non-Linear Systems micro-oscilloscope (a 1 or 2" screen using an ultra-sensitive Telefunken CRT) apart to see if there were any good ideas that could be used. The found that some of the amplifier circuits inside were implemented using CMOS gates. This was back in 1981.